The resurgence of writing about the history of the Armenians in the Late Ottoman period in the past two decades in the West and in Turkey should not be ignored. Despite the fact that the focus of scholars continues to be on the history of the Armenian Genocide from its different perspectives, the history of Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire must also be given adequate attention. The centennial of the genocide brought with it global attention to the Armenian Genocide, considered one of the classical genocides of the 20th century. One hundred years ago the radical clique of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the ruling party in the Ottoman government, took the decision to exterminate the Armenians in order to solve once and for all the Armenian Question that had been lingering since the treaty of Berlin in 1878 and which had become a major burden on, and a source of contention for, the Ottoman Empire and an excuse for European intervention in its internal affairs. Prior to the genocide, Armenians lived in about 100 cities and more than 3,000 villages. The majority of Armenians resided in the eastern provinces of the Empire, which they considered their historic homeland. Between the years of 1915-1923 more than one and a half million Armenians were uprooted from their lands in Western Armenia, today’s Eastern Anatolia, as a result of a deliberate policy of extermination under the guise of World War I.
Post-genocide Armenian historiography
The result was catastrophic in terms of human toll, destruction of churches, homes, schools, and libraries. In sum, it was the obliteration of a civilization that had existed in the region for three millennia. Those who survived the genocide were dispersed to the four corners of the world and created the modern Armenian Diaspora. With perseverance and resilience these vestiges of the genocide worked hard to rebuild their communities, reconstructing their identity, culture, and religion under the grimmest conditions and based on local exigencies. The beleaguered intellectuals/scholars who survived the genocide reconnected with their past by writing the history of their provinces, towns, and villages in order to preserve the memory of what used to be their historic homeland. This literature was a combination of historical, sociographic, and ethnographic studies. They included such subjects as the topography and history of the respective areas in the Ottoman Empire, the religious institutions, economic, cultural and social life, political groups, and philanthropic organizations. The variegated dimension of this literature is important because it highlights the heterogeneous facets of the Armenian communities residing in the various regions of the Empire with differences in local dialects, social customs and cultures, and popular literatures.Footnote 1 It is this phase that should be considered as the beginning of the crystallization of the historiography on the Armenians in the late Ottoman period. Most of these works were written in Armenian. While one might argue that much of this literature represents mourning for the lost homeland, the writing of this period is unique since, as far as I know, there is no popular counterpart mirroring the same period of time in Turkish. This stems mainly from the urgency of preserving the history and memory of what was lost. Although some of these works are more descriptive than analytical, this does not negate the fact that they provide valuable information about Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire from the late early modern to the modern period. In addition, these works contain a plethora of information about the non-Armenian elements living in the eastern provinces. Hence, their integration in Ottoman historiography is of great interest.
The importance of Armenian historical works
To date there are more than 110 volumes totaling more than 90,000 pages about the history of Armenians in the different regions of the Empire. The majority of these works have been published by the Armenian compatriotic unions of their respective cities, towns, and villages of the Empire.Footnote 2 The three phases of violence (The Hamidian Massacres of 1894-1896, the Adana Massacres of 1909, and the Armenian Genocide 1915-1923) inflicted on the Armenians of the Empire are discussed in the majority of these works. Some of these volumes deal with large geographic areas, such as Vahe Haig’s important work on the history of the Armenians in the Ottoman province of Kharpert (Harput or Memuret-ül-Aziz) and the sixty-five Armenian villages around it.Footnote 3 Other volumes deal with just a single village, such as Vahan. Hambartsumian’s study of Govdoon, a village in the Hafik region of the province of Sebastia (Sivas). Published in Paris in 1927, Hambartsumian’s volume provides ample information about Govdoon beginning in the 19th century and ending with the Armenian Genocide. Despite the fact that the book was written immediately after the genocide with limited access to sources it, nevertheless, represents a modest effort to reconstruct the history of an important village in the province of Sivas.Footnote 4 A good number of the essential works on the history of Armenians of Erzurum, Thrace, Macedonia, Palu, Marash, Zeitun, Kesaria (Kayseri), Bardizag (Bahçecik), Adapazar (Adapazarı), and Hadjin among others were written during the inter-war period, at a time in which a Turkish exclusivist historiography was being grafted.Footnote 5
Arshag Alboyadjian: the prominent historian
For the sake of space I would like here to single out one prominent Armenian historian, Arshag Alboyadjian (1879–1962), whose monumental works on the history of Armenians of the eastern provinces is unmatched. Born in the Üsküdar neighborhood in Istanbul, Alboyadjian was a graduate of the Berberian and Getronagan schools. He started his writing career in 1897, writing articles for the Armenian daily newspaper Puzantion. From 1910 to 1922, Alboyadjian occupied the position of the secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul. Following the armistice of Mudros in October 1918, the Patriarchate of Istanbul was reestablished. Patrirarch Zaven Ter Yeghyayan arrived in Istanbul on March 4, 1919. His immediate task was to create an Information Bureau (Deghegadou Tivan) put under the direction of Alboyadjian and Garabed Nurian (1875–1955) from the Political Council of the Armenian National Assembly. The mission of the Bureau was to collect all types of demographic, social, political, and economic information pertaining to the destruction of the Armenians. It also prepared files to be used to prosecute the culprits of the genocide for the Military Tribunals. In 1922 he moved to Cairo and worked as a teacher and as the head of the Divan of the Armenian Diocese of the city. In addition to his contribution to the study of prominent Armenian literary and religious figuresFootnote 6, Alboyadjian made a major contribution to Armenian studies through his monumental writings about the Armenian provinces. He was a pioneer in the genre of in-depth studies and set the pattern for the future authors who published works dealing with the history of Armenians in different provinces, cities, towns, and villages. His works include the two-volume, 2479 page, history of the Armenians of Kesaria published in 1937Footnote 7; his 1751 page work on Yevtogia (Tokat) published in 1952Footnote 8; his work on the Armenians of Gudina (Kütahya) published in 1961Footnote 9; and finally his work on the Armenians of Malatia published in 1961.Footnote 10 In these studies Alboyadjian provides detailed and concise information about the histories, geographies, cultures, social relations and economies of these respective areas. All of his studies end with the destructions of these communities during the genocide.
Early Turkish republican historiography and the Armenians
While the Armenian survivors of the genocide were in a process of salvaging their history, the Turkish Republic under the Republican Peoples Party (RPP) was initiating its grandiose campaign of rewriting the history of the Turkish nation, dissecting it from the Ottoman past and establishing the foundations of an official Turkish history that stretched all the way back to the Hittite period. In this process the history of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was erased in a systematic manner. The erasure that began in World War I by way of physical destruction, continued in the Republican period as the erasure of any traces of Armenians in the historiography and in the collective memory of the Turkish nation. This is a strong testament to the continuum that existed between the Empire and the Turkish Republic
Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, the early Republican period was a crucial phase during which history was used as the tool of ideological manipulation in order to detach the republic from its Ottoman past, a past that was composed of a multi-cultural society including different ethnic and religious groups. In the process of nation building, the non-Muslim and non-Turkish elements of the Empire were excised and became ahistorical agents. Furthermore, the exigencies of constructing national consciousness through the medium of Turkification among a population that included millions of Muslim refugees fostered an eagerness to provide a new history of the Turkish nation, one that emphasized that the Turks were an ancient and civilized people and the first dwellers of Anatolia.Footnote 11 One of the seminal works of the Republican period, produced by a committee in close collaboration with Atatürk, was a 606 page work entitled Turk Tarihinin Ana Hatları (Outlines of Turkish History) which “sought to reconcile scientism, Darwinism, racial theories, and the Turkic past and to explain world history from the emergence of the cosmos to the establishment of the Turkish Republic under ‘Mustafa Kemal’s flag’”.Footnote 12 In this major work, regarded as one of the foundational work of Turkish history, Armenians were only mentioned 5 times in the section of the history of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 13
Using various historical congresses in venues such as the People’s Houses, the regime succeeded in engraving the new Turkish history, called the Turkish Official History (Türk Resmi Tarihi), into to the hearts and minds of Turkish society, with the aim of strengthening the ideological tenants of the Turkish Republic. These ideological tenants ignored the existence of Armenians and their contribution to the Ottoman society of the Empire and concentrated only on the Turkish elements as the dominant historical agent. This was not confined to the field of history rather it encompassed the fields of archeology, art history, and linguistics, with the sole aim to prove that Anatolia was the ancient homeland of the Turkish people.Footnote 14 Therefore, the names of Armenian villages, churches, and archeological sites were erased and altered to mosques, Turkish villages, and Turkish archeological cites. However, with the arrival of the multi-party system following World War II and the decline of authoritarian tendencies, critical studies about Turkish history began to emerge.
In this period two significant works appeared about the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The first was written by Esat Uras, who was a former member of the CUP and was sent to Anatolia to study the minorities.Footnote 15 Uras would lay the foundation of the Turkish official thesis about Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and their role/fate in World War I. From then on many Turkish nationalist historians would use his work as the basis of their research about the history of the Armenians in the Empire. Second, the work of Y.G. Çark which was about the role of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.Footnote 16 Çark was an Armenian priest by the name of Yervant Gomidas Çarkcıyan, who did not feel comfortable using his real name. His book is important as it provides a chronological description of the role of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish state in terms of their service to the state, their privileges, their role in the economic, political, social, and cultural life. However, it portrays an overly rosy picture of toleration on the part of the Ottoman and Turkish states toward the Armenians. From 1953 to 1976 there is a hiatus in publications on Armenian history. The scholarship on the Armenians that was written after 1976 was a reaction to the assassinations of Turkish diplomats by radical Armenian groups whose aim was to bring international attention to the Armenian genocide and the denial of the Turkish state. Consequentially, in the 70s and 80s a new group of nationalist historians, some of them retired diplomats, would emerge with the sole aim of countering the “Armenian allegations” of genocide.
It is not until the 90’s that we see a new trend emerging among Turkish liberal historians on the Armenians genocide. Most of these scholars happened to be outside Turkey, reaping the fruits of academic freedom in their quest to counter the official Turkish narrative on the Armenian Genocide.Footnote 17 Eventually more scholars within Turkey began to talk openly about the fate of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, risking Turkish state’s persecution and prosecution. A major development that took place within the field of the Armenian Genocide historiography was the conference entitled “Ottoman Armenians during the Era of Imperial Decline: Academic Responsibility and Issues of Democracy” that was held in Istanbul (2005) despite pressure from the state to block it. The conference marks an important step for Turkish liberal historiography, because for the first time since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, a meeting within a Turkish university questioned the state narrative on one of the most sensitive issues-the Armenian Genocide. This is significant whether or not the word ‘genocide’ was used. Historians from diverse backgrounds, directors of Armenians studies programs and chairs, Armenian institutions and organizations (such as Society of Armenian Studies [SAS], the Gomidas Institute, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research [NAASR], the Nubarian Library, the Zoryan Institute and the Hrant Dink Foundation established after the assassination of the Turkish Armenian journalist in 2007) groups (such as Workshop for Turkish-Armenian Scholarship), and publishing houses (such as Aras Publishing House founded in Istanbul in 1993) all have played important roles in their different capacities in the development of the historiography of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Despite all of these positive developments, more work needs to be done in integrating the monumental volumes about the history of Armenians in cities, towns, and villages of the Ottoman Empire into the main stream historiography. Solely relying on Ottoman and European archives will not do justice to the history of Armenians of the Empire. More than 110 Armenian historical volumes include minute details that do not exist in these archives. It is the combination of these books with the Ottoman and European archives as well as the archives of Armenian churches, contemporary newspapers and periodicals, European travelers literature and studies, that will provide a better picture of the history of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. During the last two decades, two important projects brought forth the importance of these volumes. These projects must be applauded. The first is the 13 volumes series (2000-2014) “Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces” edited by Richard Hovannisian from University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA)Footnote 18 and the second is the Houshamadyan project based in Berlin and directed by Vahé Tashjian.Footnote 19
